The Dark Knight Breaks Home Video Records

Can any one, or anything, stop the money making machine that is The Dark Knight?

As the film stands as of today (December 11th, 2008) it has had a box office haul of $530,594,370 domestically and $465,956,888 internationally for a total of $996,551,258 gross. This isn’t to short change the fact it cost $185 million to produce, but it is still a highly successful film no matter how you slice it. There has also been the surprising news that the film will be re-released to theaters on January 23rd, 2009 for another go, and this all but guarantees that the film will break through the $1 billion dollar level.

I bring all of this up because earlier this week the film was released on DVD. While I certainly expected it be successful, I knew something was up when I was at Walmart at midnight Monday night and there was a line in the electronics department of people waiting for them to wheel out their supply. I can’t say I remember ever seeing that before any other DVD, so the writing was on the wall this was going to be big. (For the record, mine was on its way via UPS, I was there for other reasons)

Well, the numbers are in, and the sales for the first 24 hours was 600,000 Blu-ray copies and 2.4 million standard DVDs. The previous Blu-ray champ was Iron Man with 400,000 copies in its first week… sorry, Iroan Man.

Warner Brothers is trying to woo Christopher Nolan & Jonathan Nolan, the brothers who wrote the movie and Christopher directed, back for another installment, but they are currently not jumping at the chance. Christopher has been quoted in numerous interviews of fearing the curse of third film in a series (See Spider-Man 3), and he has also said he hasn’t been struck by an idea yet for another outing of the caped crusader.

I have to say, “Stick to your guns, Chris”. If we only get two movies from him of Batman, then so be it. Sure I would like to see a third film in the series, but I want it to be ‘right’, and not just made to be made. Sure there are more Batman villains he can tackle, but would they be worthy of carrying a film? Catwoman is possible… The Riddler is a bit weak… Mr. Nolan has publicly declared he doesn’t like The Penguin… Harley Quinn couldn’t carry a film on her own, and without The Joker, she would be hard to do… Posion Ivy couldn’t do it on her own… Mr. Freeze is too silly and so on and so forth.

With these new sales numbers Warner Brothers is sure to be courting Mr. Nolan harder for a third film, but what say you, should he go for it?